Tuesday, October 28, 2014

31 Days of Horror: Evil Dead II

Bruce Campbell is groovy ... and a little insane in Evil Dead II.

In addition to our
regular programming, every day this month, Last Cinema Standing will be
bringing readers recommendations from the best of the horror genre as we make
our way to Halloween. This should not be treated as a “best of” list but more
as a primer. You can read the full introduction to Last Cinema Standing’s 31
Days of Horror here, and be sure to check back each day for a new suggestion.

Day 28: Evil Dead II (1987)

Groovy.

It would be hard to own a word as thoroughly as Bruce
Campbell owns the word “groovy.” The man just radiates groove. For crying out loud, his Twitter handle is actually
@GroovyBruce. The screening I attended last year of Fede Alvarez’s fantastic
remake, Evil Dead, was a raucous,
jubilant affair with a packed house of people who knew what they wanted and got
it. They cheered, cringed, and laughed their way through the whole movie – and I
was right there with them – but the biggest cheer of the night came in the
three-second after-credits moment when Campbell appears in near silhouette as Ashley
J. Williams and says, “Groovy.”

The transformation of Campbell from Bruce Campbell Actor
into Bruce Campbell Ambassador of All Things Groovy took place right here in Evil Dead II. Director Sam Raimi has
always taken a perverse delight in tormenting longtime friend and collaborator
Campbell. This is egged on by the fact that Raimi has not just a little contempt
for his and Campbell’s most famous creation, going so far as to call Ash the
equivalent of a clueless moron.

To be fair, the Ash who shows up at the cabin in The Evil Dead is a bit of a bumbling
fool, but what can any of us say we would do when faced with an ancient and
unstoppable evil? Evil Dead II is a
direct sequel to The Evil Dead,
though some confusion is created by its opening 10 minutes, which play like the
events of the first movie told as a short film. This was necessitated by Raimi’s
desire to recap the first picture for the audience coupled with an inability to
obtain the rights to the footage from The
Evil Dead.

As it is, for the uninitiated, it could read as though Ash is
returning with a new girl to the cabin of his previous torture. To Raimi, the
distinction makes little difference, a view he addresses on the DVD commentary,
saying that people have asked if Ash would be so stupid as to return to the
cabin. In Raimi’s view – yes, yes he would. So, sequel, remake, unrelated
standalone film, it does not matter. Ash is at the cabin, and the dead are on
the loose.

However, this is not the old Ash. Whether you want to say he
has evolved from the events of the first movie or this is a reimagined take on
the character, this Ash has gone from apprentice to master in the art of
killing Deadites. The Ash of Evil Dead II
is resourceful, cunning, brave, a little crazy, and just a bit sexy, if that is
your thing. When fans get their Evil Dead
tattoos, this is the version of the character they get. He is beaten and
bloodied. His shirt his torn. He has lost a hand and replaced it with a
chainsaw, and his good hand carries a shotgun. To put it briefly, Ash has got
his groove back.

Campbell carries the first half of the movie basically on
his own. It takes a long time for the supporting characters to show up, and by
the time they do, the audience really could care less about any of them. All we
want to know is the fate of our hero. Campbell gets knocked in some corners for
being a B-movie actor – a moniker he has embraced if we go by the title of his
autobiography – but the quality of his film projects has no bearing on the
quality of his performances. I will take an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink
performance from Campbell any day over some of the stuffed-shirt performances
so often heralded.

In one of my favorite scenes in film history, the inanimate
objects of the cabin come to life and shriek with laughter at Ash’s
predicament. By this point, we can forgive Ash for having gone a touch insane,
and he returns their shrieking with a maniacal burst of laughter of his own.
What I remember is a rocking chair, a mounted deer head, a particularly
sinister lamp, and an unhinged, all-or-nothing performance from Campbell.

It is hard for me to discuss Campbell without sounding like
a gushing fan, but I embrace it. I have been a fan since before I knew who he
was. He lends his voice to the main character from one of my favorite video
games as a child – “Pitfall 3D.” To me, Pitfall Harry was as cool as Indiana
Jones, and Campbell is Pitfall Harry. Then I saw Evil Dead II. I was too young to understand everything I was
seeing, but the visceral thrills and unmitigated joy I felt watching that movie
could not be matched by anything else.

For all intents and purposes, Evil Dead II is a horror-comedy, a genre changeup from The Evil Dead. It features Raimi’s love
of Three Stooges-style slapstick and the kind of wild pratfalls of which
Campbell is a master. It is a near-perfect exercise in genre blending that is
sometimes regarded as superior to their first effort. I cannot go that far
because the first time is always the best, but this gets damn close, and as
experiences go, Evil Dead II is damn
groovy.

Tomorrow, we bring the
Evil Dead series to a close with yet
another genre switch and a hell of a lot of medieval insanity.